At the risk of appearing Apple blog heavy I’ve stumbled across an new app from Wordpress that allows you to write blog entries from you iPod Touch or iPhone.

Experiences using Safari on the iPod were not too satisfying with Wordpress’ causing Safari to crash. This app however makes the whole thing much easier and quicker.

It has a handy preview feature allowing the blog to be seen as it would when published. As yet no rich text editting, so no adding links or fancy font colours. There’s the option to add pictures straight from your photo library or take a new one with built in camera.

So far it all works very well, the only draw back being the strain it puts on your typing finger!

In the wake of the problems that plagued Apple’s launch of it’s MobileMe technology, the company has issued an apology to it’s MobileMe subscribers. As MacWorld states there is to be a free 30 days subscription to all those that signed up, which one has to say is generous and thoughtful, it’s not often a company of Apple’s size and power admits to a failure like this and tries to make amends.

Despite these issues the 2.0 update and the launch of the Apps Store have proved a hit with users, with a reported 10 million downloads in the first weekend alone.

Every day I look at a lot of websites. And every day, I’m faced with the same issues of poor navigation and menu design. I believe basic usability is not a science, it’s common sense - and one which everyone has the ability to think through and implement. However, on many websites, it’s clear that aesthetics still rule over usability. A disproportional amount of time is being spent to make a site look great, and not enough time spent making it work great.

One issue that continually frustrates me, is the seeming infatuation with requiring every page in the website to be available from the main menu structure. This ultimately results in unwieldy menus, roll outs and multiple levels of deep navigation (and certainly not good SEO practise).

These site owners are missing the point. Effective site navigation is not limited to the menu structure alone. Also available is a page of targeted information, and one of the the fundemental building blocks of the internet - Links (URL’s or Uniform Resource Locator). Internal on-page links are still a hugely underused form of navigation. Properly implemented, they provide targeted information to the site user, a flowing user experience, simplify the main navigation, and feed the search engines with keyword rich links (consider an internal link a superfood!). Internal links can also be used to create a persuasive journey through a site, guiding your site visitor towards a targeted, and therefore higher probability conversion.

A few basic tips to look out for when implementing internal links:

Make internal links keyword targeted (example: if you’re linking to a page about keyword research, make sure the link contains ‘keyword research‘)

Ensure the link is linking to a targeted page that will be useful to the visitor

If the link is within a body of text, make the link standout i.e. bold, underlined or both. You could also make it react when a visitor hovers over the text i.e. change colour, underline (I wouldn’t recommend going from normal to bold as this ’shifts’ the text when the linking text gets larger)

Check your links work!

Good luck with the internal linking.

Finally Apple have launched the new Apps store and 2.0 software update for iPod and iPod Touch. Although the launch didn’t go entirely smoothly the software was eventually available by Saturday 12th July and I did manage to get it installed with no problems. The process is fairly painless although requires a backup of your data and then a restore of that data, so prepare to wait for your songs, movies etc to be re-synced with the iPod.

…and so far the software looks pretty good, new Apps store is running allowing various bits of 3rd party software to be installed on your device as needed.

Quality pun… and I only came across it once, which is surprising! It was though a pretty comprehensive whitewash by the brit as almost all others around were either falling off the track or picking the wrong strategy.

From my own viewpoint at Abbey it was like amatuer hour as the worst of the rain came down mid-way through the race and each driver came a cropper on the flooded tarmac; Kubica flying into view backwards, Webber spinning off across the same piece of grass lap after lap like a demented Flymo…

That said it was, as is almost always the case at Silverstone, a fantastic race and well worth the year long wait and the price! But seems as though we’ve not long left at the Home o British Motorsport if the rumours are to be believed, personally I can’t see it happening… Are the facilities better? Is getting out of the circuit going to take less than 2 hours? Will the toilets be clean and plentiful? Am I going to get a free helicopter ride to and from the track?

Well, probably not but we should all have dreams…

…or should that be cheat sheets?

Surely everyone likes a nice, concise quick reference sheet? No more endless flicking through the pages of a book looking for the one small nugget of information that you found 2 weeks ago and forgot to bookmark with a post-it note only to realise that you’ve got the wrong book.

Here are a few cheat sheets for Regular Expressions, mod_rewrite, PHP, CSS and even one for SQL Server.

Bought to you by www.addedbytes.com, recently changed due to a request from a leading maker of whisky, so thanks very much to Dave.

Google today anounced on their Webmaster Central Blog that they have introduced a new algorythm to index Flash content. This could mean big changes within the SERPs as new and existing sites will expose additional content to Google. The files exposed are SWFs, which can be either ‘gadgets’ such as Flash buttons or Flash menus, or complete, self-contained Flash websites.

This means Google will be able to extract keyword information and URL’s from Flash content and discover more as it crawls your website. However, it falls short of Flash FLVs used in video such as YouTube as these files contain no textual content.

However, developers and stakeholders should be aware of a few issues around Google indexing Flash content.

1. Currently any Flash loaded via dynamic client side scripting (Javascript) will not be seen.
2. Flash content from external source will not be indexed i.e. HTML, XML or another SWF file. Google will index this seperately. This content will not be indexed as part of the flash file.
3. Google is experiencing difficulties in indexing Flash content written in bidirectional languages. Currently, this translates to Hebrew and Arabic language content from Flash files.

My final thoughs are this: althought this is an exciting progression for Flash, will it make SERPs even more crowded? Only time will tell what impact this evolutionary step has on ranking. Of course, content embedded in Flash files will almost certainly challange ‘Black Hat’ SEO’s to massage rankings unethically. Watch this space for more developments…

There are (apparently) a few thing to be aware of. Google willl only read the text in a flash file (SWF)and not text that has been loaded in from an external source by the flash file. i.e. HTML, XML and external data from a database.